A photographer and designer shows the photo retouching process in detail.
TweetMeme and Site Scrapers – Content Theft
TweetMeme finds the hottest stories from twitter for you to retweet
At least this is what Tweetmeme would want you to believe.
The purpose, from what I can gather, is that tweetmeme is a service that allows you to retweet twitter tweets .. your retweet basically points people to the story that was posted on Twitter by someone else.
Fair enough .. if you use Twitter, be prepared to have others copy your headlines.
Scrapers have discovered a wonderful way to abuse the Tweetmeme service, in that instead of pointing to the headline in the original tweet or site, the headline url is redirected to a website other than that of the original author.
(Visit the linked text above, and click on any one of the links he has and you’ll see what I mean)
The original content is lifted from the source blog or other publication and re-posted on the scraper domain and the retweet url is written to point to the scraper site.
I won’t name names in this case, but today’s incident involved a few boneheads in India that somehow thought that it would be really cool to steal my content and re-post it on their own domain, with a retweet pointing to it.
I’ll thank Google for pointing all of this out to me in the first place.
A while after posting, I searched the keyword(s) used in the article and found it top slot in the SERPS .. 5 minutes after that, the scraped article appeared two positions down from mine.
I followed up on what I considered to be a bogus listing by first notifying Google. I supplied the scraper source code, including all of the Adsense and analytics information contained within.
I then began to prepare a DMCA filing because the scraper was hosted on American servers. I then made initial contact to the owners in India. I also cc’ed their web host into any emails I sent so that they would be made aware of the incident and what exactly I planned to do about it.
Long story short, the content was removed as quickly as these wanna-be scrapers could remove it.
I knew what their web host would do under the terms of the DMCA and so did they. Google, on the other hand, might be a different story. The scraper domain is destined to be banned anyway because of the abuses and whether or not my report of the abuse to Google has sped the process up remains to be seen — either way — this scraper site is history.
Tweetmeme has a long ways to go in curbing all of the abuse it is getting at the hands of site scrapers and for now the ranges are blocked, and probably will be for the duration.
Inserting video into your Email
I’ve been sending video via email for years — it’s really nothing new at all.
Whenever I produce a marketing or other kind of instructional video, and want to include it in my monthly newsletter, I simply write it into the source code of our email client like this;
<iframe src =”https://www.your-website.com/Untitled-1.htm” width=”420″ height=”400″>
<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>
</iframe>
They can watch the video right in their email and can also download it if they wish with a hyperlink provided below the iframe window.
For .flash or .gif?
Using the same iframe structure you can have a flash header load too. You’ll want to write the iframe to the specific size of the flash file itself so everything fits. Your email recipient will be able to actually click on the flash links located in the header to visit the site directly.
You can also place more than one iframe into the email source code, so if by chance you have a flash footer you can include that too — with a bit of select positioning — of course.
You also may want to write out any scrolling and/or borders so that everything blends seamlessly.
Happy Coding
After 19 years, Ulysses solar probe to go dark
NASA and the European Space Agency are about to pull the plug on a robotic solar probe that just wouldn’t quit. The Ulysses probe was launched from the space shuttle Discovery in 1990. It was supposed to last five years. But it’s now nearing 19 years, 5.8 billion miles and still going.
Sixteen months ago, the two space agencies announced that Ulysses was freezing up and about to die in a matter of weeks. Somehow it kept operating, sending important science information about an extraordinarily quiet year for the sunspots and solar wind.
That will end on Tuesday when the space agencies turn off Ulysses’ transmitter. Officials say issues with power, location and antennas make it no longer useful.
Megabanks may be slimmed down, told to prepare plans for own demise
Under the administration’s proposal, companies such as Citi, Goldman Sachs and others in a broad top tier engaged in complex transactions would face stricter scrutiny and have to hold more assets and more cash as cushions against a downturn.
They also would have to anticipate their own demise, drafting detailed descriptions of how they could be dismantled quickly without causing damaging repercussions. Think of it as planning their own funerals — and burials.
Obama’s plan, in short, aims to make it far less appealing to be so big. That was the middle ground the administration sought, a step short of an outright ban on systemically risky companies.
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